Nvidia was co-founded by Jensen Huang in 1993 and became a major AI-chip leader.
Huang founded Nvidia with Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem in 1993. The company initially focused on graphics hardware for personal computers and introduced the GeForce brand in 1999. Its graphics processing units, or GPUs, were designed for highly parallel calculations and became central to modern computer graphics.
Nvidia’s importance expanded when researchers began using GPUs for general-purpose computing and machine learning. The company’s CUDA software platform, introduced in 2006, allowed developers to use Nvidia GPUs for workloads beyond rendering images. That combination of hardware and software helped Nvidia become a leading supplier for artificial-intelligence training and inference systems.
Nvidia is sometimes described as a semiconductor manufacturer, but it primarily designs chips and relies on specialist foundries for fabrication. Its market value has risen sharply at various points because investors associate its products with fast-growing AI and data-center demand.